The next time newspaper reporters start making fun of how stupid some politicians are, they could always discuss Adam Taylor. The Washington Post foreign affairs writer was dim enough to ask “France has strict gun laws. Why didn’t that save Charlie Hebdo victims?”
It never sinks in, that trusty old maxim about if you outlaw guns, only the outlaws will have guns. Taylor not only asked a dim-witted question, he mocked Donald Trump for asking it, and then he asked it in all sincerity:
"Isn't it interesting that the tragedy in Paris took place in one of the toughest gun control countries in the world?" American reality television star Donald Trump wrote on Twitter shortly after the news broke. The tweet prompted both praise (over a thousand retweets) and scorn (Trump was labelled a "moron" and an "idiot" by other tweeters).
Trump, a perennial attention seeker, was likely attempting to score political points and insult liberals with his tweet. But behind the disingenuity, there is is a genuinely troubling question: Why didn't France's gun laws save the Charlie Hebdo victims?
In other words, “liberals are being mocked as morons, but seriously, why is it?” Conservative readers can keep laughing as Taylor tries to puzzle this out:
How did the attackers get the guns?
Almost certainly illegally. Bloomberg reports that weapons designed for military use, such as the Kalashnikov AK series, have been illegally flooding France over the past few years, with state bodies recording double digit increases....
Could more relaxed gun laws have changed the situation?
...Some, such as the National Review's Jim Geraghty, have pondered how the event would go down in the United States, where more gun ownership could have prompted an "armed response from ordinary citizens." Such an alternative reality scenario is hard to guess at, though it's worth noting that the evidence from the United States is far from clear, especially in shootings involving automatic weapons.
It’s always “far from clear” that conservatives are right after a deadly shooting like this. That’s exactly why liberals are willing to sound really clueless. They don’t want to admit anything. As in:
Did France's gun laws fail?
French gun laws are a response to a variety of factors. For example, statistics from Gun Policy show that the number of deaths from firearms was about 0.2 per 100,000 people in 2010 and hovered around that for the previous few years. In America, it was a little over 2.8 per 100,000. Mass shootings are relatively rare, when compared to the United States: While the Charlie Hebdo attack was horrific, it was also an anomaly.
It’s not an anomaly to the 12 dead people. It’s a failure of the gun laws. Or, it’s a failure of gun law backers to see that violent terrorists aren’t gun-control champions. One can use the overall data on gun violence as an argument, but the overall data doesn't work if you lost someone in this specific "anomaly."
